Create a Post-Publish Checklist for Your Blog

Writing your blog post is only part of the job when building your site’s traffic. To maximize the benefit of having a blog, you should also run down a list of other tasks (some quick, some not-so-quick) to ensure you’re getting the most bang for your blog buck.

After you’ve completed all the steps in your blog pre-publish checklist, you should move right on to your post-publish checklist, which we’ll help you compile here.

Everyone’s post-publish checklist will differ. so you have to decide which items are the most important for you. There are literally endless possibilities, but these are a few of the more common tasks.

Post to social media. Facebook and Twitter are a given, but depending on your brand, you may also want to post to LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. If you’re short on time, you can usually use the same or similar copy for each platform, but it’s best to customize for maximum effect. Remember to tag anyone you’ve mentioned in the post so they know you’ve written about them: They’re likely to help spread the word.

Send out in a newsletter. There are tools that will automatically email your blog posts to your mailing list as soon as they’re published. (We use MailChimp for WordPress for this blog.) But if you don’t have such a system set up, you’ll want to manually create a newsletter that promotes your blog post, especially since a lot of people won’t see it on social media. Some people like to include the entire post in a newsletter, while others include a teaser followed by a link back to the full post, in order to drive site traffic. The choice in strategy is yours to determine, based on your audience.

Send a personalized email to anyone mentioned. If you wrote a post that mentions a company or individual, they’d probably like to know about it, so send them an email directly, even if they’re already on your newsletter list or following you on social media.

Respond to any comments. Sure, you’ll have to wade through some spam and flame posts, but any bona fide comments should get responses so your audience knows you’re listening. Make sure you get alerts when comments come in, and respond to them as soon as you can, preferably within a day.

Seek out similar content and post a link in the comments. If your content is relevant to a post or article elsewhere on the web, share it. (Note that some sites do not allow URLs in the comments section.) The keyword here is “relevant”: Don’t go posting all over the worldwide web or you could get yourself flagged as a spammer. And be sure to include a short comment (for context) along with the link.

If you want to expand your list, think about how you initially find blogs and then repeat the steps the author took for you to find them. For example, if you regularly find blogs in Google Ads, you may want to consider investing in a marketing budget. Your checklist will depend on your individual goals, but the above list contains the most important steps.

Jenna Rose Robbins started her life as a nerd on her Commodore 64 coding Mad Libs games for her friends. After graduating from the University of Michigan, she parlayed her digital talents into a career and went on to work at AOL and launch multi-million-dollar websites for Disney. After heading up FIJI Water's marketing department, she opened up shop under the Siteseeing banner, which helps small businesses improve their local presence on the web. When she's not getting eyestrain at her computer, Jenna can generally be found trying to avoid emergency rooms around the world.